Free Web NovelChapter 82: A Different Destination
Doctor felt the killing intent before he turned to it .
It came off the Red Apostle in a pressure that had weight , a thing the body registered the way it registered cold or a drop in the air — too strong to ignore , filling the glade with the single fixed wanting of one specific death . Even the Choir-Eater stirred at it , the countless eyes along its restored length shifting toward the source — and finding the intent aimed at someone else , the creature let it go . Its eyes went back to the apparitions .
But Rapax caught its attention on the way .
The semi-corporeal shadow of him , the Living Darkness flickering at his edges , was the kind of shadow the Choir-Eater hunted — and a fraction of its eyes held on him for a moment , tempted . Then it registered the mark already on him , the Red Apostle’s claim , the killing intent that had named Rapax its own — and the Choir-Eater let that go too . It had had its spar with the Widow . It had lost segments and regained them , and it was hungry again , and there were apparitions enough.
It wriggled away .
The twenty meters of it crossing the glade in the rolling motion that the eye still wanted to call serpentine , putting ten and then fifteen meters between itself and the marked prey , to where another cluster of the remaining fifteen derived apparitions had finished forming — and it pounced , binding three of them under the length of its body at once , the circular mouth opening , the interrupted feast resumed . It wanted no part of the Red Apostle’s fight . It wanted only to eat .
The Red Apostle watched it go .
She wanted no part of the fight either — not here , not with the Choir-Eater feeding fifteen meters off , not in the vicinity of a thing that ate shadow when she was about to spend hers. Her whole focus was Rapax . And she did not move toward him .
She moved toward her own cut off legs .
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The two front legs the guillotine had severed lay where they had fallen , in the green wet of her own blood . The Red Apostle crossed to them on her clawed feet , the spider-limbs folded over her shoulders shifting with the motion , and she bent and picked them up , one in each clawed hand .
She stripped them .
The flesh and the muscle torn away from the chitin in wet handfuls and dropped , until what remained in each hand was bone — the long structural bone of a Red Widow’s foreleg , bared . And she raised the ends to her mouth , to the crowding of canines too many for the jaw , and she bit — working the bone-ends against her teeth , grinding them down to crude angular points , the way a thing with no tools makes a tool out of what it has .
Two bone blades .
Crude , pointed , the length of short swords , one in each clawed hand — made from her own severed legs , the loss the guillotine had dealt her turned into the weapons she would answer it with . She held them the way a swordsman held a matched pair . She had become a humanoid to kill a humanoid , and now she had armed the humanoid shape with blades to meet the man who fought with two of his own .
She turned the eight eyes back to Rapax .
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Doctor moved to him .
Rapax was finishing the last of the four apparitions , the twin sabers closing the engagement , and Doctor came up beside the shadow sphere with the pale chain still in his hand .
" Rapax . Let us move . You have been locked on by the Red Widow . "
Rapax dodged the apparition’s last motion and drove a saber through the kill . " I have sensed it . " The baritone low , strained. " But the shadow novices — I have already failed to save Rada . I cannot lose the rest . And the Choir-Eater is still lurking . "
" You cannot protect them if you are dead , dear . " Doctor’s warmth holding, the gleam in it undimmed . " You and I cannot fight the Red Apostle with our shadow domains discarded — and if we use our full shadow powers here , the Choir-Eater will be on our tail too . One pissed-off Red Apostle is enough for the both of us . We do not need a hungry Choir-Eater as well . " A small breath of a laugh . " Hee hee . "
Rapax sensed the truth in it .
A fight at full power , here , would ring the dinner bell — and there was no fighting the Apostle at less than full power . The only way to fight her was to take her somewhere he could open his domain without the Choir-Eater answering . Away from the glade . Away from the tree .
He delivered the killing blow to the last apparition and turned his head toward the other bleed bark , and he shouted —
" Shadow novices , stay hidden . I will come back after I deal with the Red Widow . "
— and he and Doctor jumped the fallen trunks and ran from the glade , into the forest , away .
The Red Apostle wanted exactly this . freёwebnovel.com
She had been hesitating to begin the fight in the Choir-Eater’s vicinity too , and the running prey gave her what the predator in her valued above all other things — a hunt , a quarry in flight , the satisfaction that a thing run down and killed held over a thing that simply died where it stood . She went after them , the spider-legs unfolding from her shoulders as she moved , and the glade emptied of all of it at once .
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Kei watched the whole of it from his fissure .
The glade held only the Choir-Eater now , wriggling through the last of its interrupted feast , finishing the apparitions one at a time . The Umbrath night was nearly over . In half an hour the first light of Cruoris (day 3 of abyssal week) would reach the Cruentus Heart , the long night ending , the dark that had held the whole expedition giving way .
Asp’s voice came through the thin veil between their fissures .
" We take turns , " she said . " Watch and sleep . You first , then us . We wait for the Choir-Eater to finish and leave , and then we go and find Rapax . "
" Ok , " Kei said .
His voice gave her the word .
His heart had set a different destination .
He would wait — for the Choir-Eater to finish , for the glade to clear , for the moment the way opened . And then he would not go to find Rapax . He would go up , into the canopy , into the dark the Viletails had carried her into . He would go and find Rada . The plan was Asp’s . The destination was his own , and it was not the one he had agreed to .
He closed his eyes , and kept the watch, and waited for the glade to empty.
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Rada woke to the sound of bone .
A clicking , overhead — small , irregular , continuous . It did not stop and it did not follow any rhythm she could name , and some part of her that had not finished waking understood it as wrong before the rest of her understood it at all . The sound of bone touching bone , high up , again and again, where there was no wind to move anything and the things were moving anyway .
Her eyes opened slowly .
She was lying on her side . Bloodmoss beneath her — soft , and warm , too warm , the warmth of ground with something decomposing under it . Her hands were bound behind her back . And the smell reached her as her eyes cleared , the smell of a place where more had died than had been eaten , the rot of it banked deep in the moss and the roots .
She knew where she was before she saw it fully .
The clicking above . The warm moving ground . The hanging shapes she could half-see in the canopy , the bundles that were not bark . A corpse garden . The Viletails’ burial ground , the place the territory kept its dead . She remembered the three of them taking her — the tail across her mouth , the rising into the canopy , the dark — and she understood that they had carried her here , to the center of the thing, and set her down on its floor .
Her eyes moved , to and fro , reading the dark for the shape of the threat .
And they found it .
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It sat on a structure of worked bleed bark , an altar of sorts , raised above the corpse-garden floor .
She could not hold the shape of it .
Her eyes went to it and slid off the count of its limbs , the edges of it refusing to stay where she put them — a human torso , a man’s , rising from a low mass that had too many legs and the wrong kind , the two halves of it joined in a place and a manner her eye would not resolve . Threads ran through it , black and fine , in and out of the flesh . The man’s jaw hung open , permanently open , and it did not close . And the one eye she could find in the ruined face was not looking where the face looked — it moved on its own , independent , tracking something the head was not turned toward .
At its feet lay a heavy mace .
And in one long , wrong, thread-strung hand it held a severed leg — a human leg , taken at the ankle — and it was turning the leg , slowly , in front of the open jaw , the independent eye moving over it , the whole abomination still in a way that was not the stillness of a dead thing but the stillness of a thing remembering . Holding the severed leg . Looking at it . As if some part of what it had been knew the leg , and was turning it over, and grieving.
Rada had not felt fear in a long time . House Darkridge did not raise its daughters to feel it , or to show it if they did .
For the first time , she felt it rise in her throat .
